Love & Marriage

Welcome to Love & Marriage Week on the gabblog!

In honor of my seventeenth anniversary, which is coming up this week, I've decided to record all my memories of falling in love, getting married and living happily ever after.

I'm doing this so my kids will know "our story"--but mostly for myself, because, sometimes, after a long day of children, bills and household appliances, it's nice to remember that it all started with a smile from a really cute boy.

(NOTE TO ALL SUBSCRIBERS OF " The Dee & Marty Chronicles": If you are expecting my romance to come anywhere close to this Romeo-and-Juliet-meets-Captain VonTrapp-and-Sister Maria-fairy-tale, please lower your expectations drastically. I'm sorry, but my love story just does not compete...no outraged inlaws, no jealous exboyfriends, no European backdrop, no lederhosen. My tale is more along the lines of A Very Brady Wedding, but it has its own modest charm.)

THE BEGINNING...

Once upon a time, long before cell phones, I-Pods or the worldwide web, there was a college freshman. This girl wrote her papers on a typewriter, hoped her parents would accept the charges on her collect phone calls and jammed to her collection of Chicago (the band, not the musical) cassette tapes. She could often be seen wearing combinations of denim, khaki, flashes of red, and sporting a very fluffy perm.

Much to her mother's disappointment, this BYU coed was not boy crazy. Her social life consisted mostly of books and babysitting. She dated very little and had only been kissed by three guys in her life. Her fondest dream was to be a social worker, librarian or a school teacher. She took 8:00 am classes and fell asleep by 10, supplementing her savings by working at a nursery school. In short, she was an 18-year-old spinster. A nerd...with a perm.

To further ensure a comatose social life, our heroine had just applied for a position as a dorm R.A.--you know, one of those motherly, cheerful and often frumpy college students who enforce "lights out" and "visiting hours" and get free room&board for babysitting freshmen. She knew she was perfect for the job.

Imagine her horror as she was not only passed over for the postion, but saw it offered to her sometime-best-friend-who-didn't-really-need-or-want-the-RA-job-but-just-went-along-to-keep-her-company-at-the-interview instead! It was a college calamity... What would she do? All the good apartments were taken...and how could she afford one anyway?...all her friends had people to room with...she would be stuck riding public transportation to her off-campus job forever... Oh, the inhumanity!

Fortunately, the bookworm had met two really cute and popular Southern gals on her freshman floor. They seemed to like her in spite of her nerdiness and invited her to share an apartment with them sophomore year. Her parents promised to help as much as they could and she planned to just save and save all summer long.

So, taking a deep breath and using her last $125 for a security deposit, the freshman signed up for a place at the King Henry Apartment complex. Little did she know, this small decision would affect her future forever!

To be continued...